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January 03, 2013

(+++) RELATING TO YOURSELF AND OTHERS

The Myths of Happiness: What
Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t—What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does.
By Sonja Lyubomirsky. Penguin. $27.95.

Talk to Me Like I’m Someone You
Love: Relationship Repair in a Flash. By Nancy Dreyfus, Psy.D.
Tarcher/Penguin. $17.95.

Talk to Me Like I’m Someone You
Love: Relationship Repair in a Flash—64 Flash Cards for Real Life. By Nancy
Dreyfus, Psy.D. Tarcher/Penguin. $15.95.

The “I’ll be happy when” mentality is the enemy of happiness,
argues psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky in The Myths of Happiness. A happiness researcher – yes, there are
such people – Lyubomirsky says that expecting happiness upon attainment of
certain milestones, such as wealth or professional accomplishment, leads only
to disappointment when those events do not in fact “:automatically” produce a
feeling of happiness. And the same is true of negative events that we expect to
destroy or prevent happiness. As Lyubomirsky puts it, “Research on hedonic adaptation
shows that we swiftly grow accustomed to most negative events.” In fact, she
argues that humans’ adaptability prevents us from becoming supremely happy
under certain circumstances and wallowing in misery under others. Thus, there
is no doubt that we tend to feel happy after getting a raise or beginning a new
romantic relationship, but the increased happiness does not last for long, and
we soon return to our individual happiness level, the one at which we were
living before the pleasurable occurrence.This sounds fatalistic, and indeed there is some level of fatalism
underlying The Myths of Happiness, as
if there is not much we can do to make ourselves happier because we tend to
return to our “default happiness setting” whether good things or bad befall
us.But Lyubomirsky takes pains to
indicate that this is not so – after all, this would not be much of a self-help
book if it reveled in “happiness predestination.” Lyubomirsky says research
suggests that unanticipated pleasures are the most rewarding, so we should
enjoy them when they occur, even if the pleasant feelings they engender do not
last; friendship is a great leveling agent for the ups and downs of life, so we
should focus on building and maintaining social relationships – which, for
humans as for other primates, are crucial to our happiness; the frequency of
positive emotions is good for health, but the intensity of positive feelings is
less important; remembering and replaying positive experiences without analyzing
them leads to happiness, while analyzing rather than reliving negative events
is a key to absorbing them and boosting happiness; and so on. Some of these
arguments are more convincing than others, and some of Lyubomirsky’s statements
are marred by either careless writing or careless editing, as when she asserts
that divorced parents have difficulty “diffusing [rather than “defusing”]
parent-child conflict.”And some of the
methods Lyubomirsky recommends to increase happiness fail to take into account
significant differences in people’s psychological organization. For example,
she says to “spend your money on experiences rather than possessions,” which
sounds fine, but other research has shown that people who are more strongly
extroverted are more likely to find experiential spending rewarding – which
means that introverts who try this prescription are likely to “go against the
grain” of their personalities, raise their stress and decrease their
happiness.Her recommendation that
people take more risks (she suggests one per month) is similarly more readily
applicable to the extroverted than the introverted.Lyubomirsky deserves credit for trying to
find ”action items” that people can use to boost happiness – in light of
research by herself and others showing that happiness tends to return to a
not-always-golden mean whether one’s experiences are positive or negative.However, her explanation of the reasons that
apparent happiness boosters and happiness suppressors both tend to have minimal
long-term effect proves more interesting and valuable than her prescriptions
for going beyond one’s individual normal setting for happiness.

Relationships, to
which Lyubomirsky pays some attention, are the entire focus of Nancy Dreyfus’ Talk to Me Like I’m Someone You Love,
whose newly revised edition incorporates two additional sections. The book
dates back to 1993 but retains an up-to-date feel, because Dreyfus focuses not
on building a relationship and not on whether a new or enduring relationship
brings happiness, but on the inevitable bumps in the relationship road and ways
to use flash cards to smooth them.Yes,
the “in a flash” portion of the subtitle refers to flash cards, and yes, there
is a new version of the book that is
a set of flash cards -- although there are just 64 of them, compared with 127
entries in the book itself.Dreyfus’
book has a strong and focused layout: simple, direct statements on red
left-hand pages are followed by explanatory material and usage suggestions for
the statements on more-traditional-looking right-hand pages. In the card deck,
the simple statements appear on the front and the more-extended discussions on
the back.Dreyfus, a psychotherapist and
couples therapist, divides her book into 11 sections: Shifting Gears, Setting
Limits, Feeling Vulnerable, Taking Responsibility, Giving Information, Getting
Clarification, Apologizing, Loving, Making Up, Making Love, and Deepening
Trust. The last two sections are new.A
sample flash card may say, “I want us to stop what we are doing to each other.
Both of us. Now.” Among the comments on this is, “This is a willingness to
honor your partnership when it would be so easy to take sides, as it
were.”Another example: “Your behavior
embarrassed me. I’m trying to tell you, not to make you feel bad, but so I can
feel close to you again.” Part of the discussion: “This flash card is for when
you end up, say, haranguing your partner on the car ride home from the scene of
your embarrassment.”One more: “Right
now, I’d do anything for you to know how much I love you.” Commentary: “This
card was not designed to be a profound declaration of love to a partner who may
be doubting it. It was designed to infuse your interchange with a dose of
goodwill…”The whole setup of Dreyfus’
book is artificial and gimmicky, and will not appeal to many couples,
especially since it requires each party to decide, during a stressful time,
just which section that particular stress fits into and just which flash card
is most appropriate to offer.On the
other hand, the very artificiality of the approach will have a cooling effect
on many arguments, and couples who are willing to try it may find that the need
to pause and reflect on just what to say via flash card actually helps defuse
volatile situations. The actual flash-card deck is even more gimmicky than the
book, but has the virtue of presenting less discussion and less information on
each card – making these cards more usable for quick responses to explosive or
potentially explosive situations. Couples willing to try an approach that seems
facile on its face but that has some good thinking behind it may find Talk to Me Like I’m Someone You Love, in
either of its forms, a worthwhile way to attempt at least partial relationship
repair – maybe only temporarily, maybe not “in a flash,” but maybe for long
enough to provide a chance to get through the surface-level difficulties and
try to handle their underlying foundations.